So this notion of augmenting your people and enabling them up to take on more interesting work – that is really what drives the automation agenda?

The reason why the automation is so important is that it does free up these teams to go think about and do things for the future. If you think about it, most tech companies in the world today are spending an incredible amount of time competing for the best of the best in the world. For a smart person in tech, there are just a lot of fun companies with fun problems to go work on. So once you’ve worked so hard to get people into the company and to ramp them up and to understand your environment, you want to keep them. You want to have them be engaged. You want them to grow and develop their careers and stay with you for this ride that is scale over a really long period of time.

In 2013, Beijing outlined a 2020 goal of having at least three globally competitive robot makers, eight subcontractor clusters, a 45% domestic market share for Chinese high-end robots and a tripling of robot penetration to 100 per 10,000 workers. […]

“We think of [the Chinese as] producing cheap widgets,” but that is not what they’re focused on, said Adams Nager, an economic research analyst… China, he said, is letting industries that rely on lots of manual labor, such as clothing and shoe production, shift out of the country to focus on capital-intensive industries such as steel and electronics where automation is a driving force. […]

One reason China will continue booming is because it has relatively low “robot density,”[…].

At the moment, China has 30 industrial robots for every 10,000 manufacturing workers—about double what it had in 2013.

In comparison, South Korea has the world’s highest robot density at 437 robots per 10,000 manufacturing workers, which is about 15 times greater than China’s. Japan’s is about 11 times greater than China’s; Germany’s is 10 times higher; and the United States’ is about three times higher.